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Mobile Technologies: Tablets and Smartphones

With 2012 just around the corner, the JofA gathered the
three technology keynote speakers from the AICPA’s 2011 Practitioners
Symposium/TECH+ Conference to talk about tech trends heading into the
new year. The nearly 90-minute conversation covered a wide range of
technical issues critical to all CPAs.

The JofA is presenting the online version of
the conversation in 10 installments released over a nearly two-month
span. Each part focuses on one major topic and features audio clips
from the conversation. Part four explores mobile computing
technologies such as smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Drew: Let’s talk some about mobile technologies. I want to
touch on what roles will the smartphone, tablet and laptop play for
the CPA in the coming years. Will, for example, the tablet ever
replace the laptop as the computer of choice for CPAs, or will we
see something else, like these ultrathin netbooks, taking over?
Also, what should we look for in the smartphone and tablet markets
in 2012 in terms of devices and apps? And going back to security,
what are the keys to wireless security? What are the most important
things CPAs can do to protect sensitive client data? And Randy, do
you want to start us off on that please?

Johnston: Well, I’ll give it a whirl. Man, you
have a lot of different questions there, so I’ll try to remember to
circle back on each of those different things. I believe that the
touch-screen environments will continue to improve the resolution, and
ease of seeing will get better, although any of the Apple products,
the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 today and the iPhone 4S, I think they’re quite
well done as they stand.

I think we’ll get additional voice recognition capabilities that
work better, and we’ve already seen that in the current Android
platforms and the iPhone platforms and so forth. We are seeing the
first of the multicore, the multiprocessor phones, which give a lot
more computing power. And interestingly enough, they’re not burning a
lot more batteries to give us a lot more speed.

So something that I think I discussed with the (TECH+ Conference)
attendees about three years ago was the virtualization of the
smartphones to run more and more things simultaneously. Many of the
new tablet competitors for the iPad are truly running applications simultaneously.

I don’t think most of the tablets, with the speeds that they have
today, will replace the laptops necessarily. But I still like to
position tablets mentally as devices for consuming content, and things
that have the keyboards today as being things for creating content,
although that’s not quite as strong as it was. And the further you are
in an organization, further up, if you’re an executive-level person,
there’s less chance you’ll actually be doing a lot of the data-entry items.

So we are concerned about the wireless security. We want that to be
encrypted at all times, and we think that all of the communications
from the MiFis and the tablets and so forth should all be set up that
way. I think it might be helpful to let maybe a few of the other guys
on the call speak about that.

Richardson:
Well, Randy, this is Rick. I would concur with your comment about the
tablets not replacing laptops, at least particularly for those that
have heavy computing use. There are now a dozen or more Bluetooth
keyboards out for most of these tablets that can do a pretty decent
job for data entry. But it still comes down to the fact that the iPad
or (HP) Slate or whatever tablet you may be using is really a
marvelous consumer of information as opposed to creator of it.

I think the people that need it for communications, whether it be
email, texting or videoconferencing, that do presentations with
clients, those are the kind of people that are going to gravitate to
that architecture quickly. And I think as we see local networking
change, even potentially out on job sites for our people in the field,
the tablet may be more viable for some work as well.

In terms of the comments that people make about the fact that “it’s
great for watching a movie, but I’m not sure I’d do a spreadsheet on
it,” I guess I can concur with that, but I also feel very strongly
that—I’ve actually gotten to the stage now where I’ve taken five trips
and the only thing I brought with me was a tablet. Yes, I wasn’t doing
much other than email and communicating back to home base, if you
will. But I don’t see that the—I think the laptop got stretched as a
device because it was the lightest thing we had at the time. And an
awful lot of people are going to find that they can exist just fine
with a tablet.

Cieslak:
Yeah, and this is David. I’ll just go ahead, and I know one of the
questions that Jeff had shared there, or had asked about, was just
securing these devices. And obviously, these things are smaller,
portable and definitely easier to misplace or otherwise have lifted.
So we’re looking at all the different portable devices in our lineup,
and we’re recommending to folks that just … at the simplest level …
you’re making sure to password-protect everything. But then from
there, if there is confidential data on there, that you’re encrypting
it and that you consider having some kind of a remote-wipe capability
on any one of these mobile devices, too, because I think that’s essential.

I mean, I speak about security a lot, and I always—you know, kind of
one of the phrases I’ve been known to repeat many, many times is we
need to think about security first and convenience second. And I think
as these devices become more portable and more pervasive, I think we
start to lose sight of the fact that maybe we do have a lot of very
important information still tied up in these devices. So it’s
important to make sure that they all do, in fact, fall under a good,
solid security framework. So I look at things like a remote-wipe tool,
the ability to kind of clean the device off if it does get misplaced
or otherwise taken from us. I’d look at that and say that’s pretty
critical.

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